February 27, 2013

Does this desire to cleanse language bear any relation to the varroa destructor, that external parasitic mite you’ve chosen for the title of your collection?

Kind of, yeah. I'm obsessed with the writings of Jacques Derrida and with the poet Francis Ponge, in particular a work of his called Soap, where he treats poetry as if it were an experiment in a laboratory. He wants to approach the event of the object through language and its cleansing. He's obsessed with paring language down in this sense, with not being poetic, with not being 'literary'. And this correlates with what Derrida says in his reading of Hegel in Glas.

"As Philip Morris came under pressure for nicotine and cigarettes, it eventually started looking at the food divisions in light of the emerging obesity crisis. And there were moments in these internal documents where Philip Morris officials were saying to the food division, 'You guys are going to face a problem with salt, sugar, fat in terms of obesity of the same magnitude, if not more than [what] we're facing with nicotine right now. And you've got to start thinking about this issue and how you're going to deal with that.' "

All Things Considered talks to the creators of These Streets, a play that tells the story of women in Seattle's grunge scene of the 1990s.

The Wall Street Journal finds that some authors have been buying their way into bestseller lists.